In this lesson we once again picked a character from the pile. I got Jafar and was given the task of creating his potential weapons and props. Afterwards we were given a room and the task was to create anthropomorphic characters from the objects that could be found in said room

Sunday, 24 January 2016

I'm beginning to start in-depth research for my story and its characters. One of the main groups to consider is the elves. Traditionally they are the short, sweet characters with pointy ears and curly shoes. I'm not sure if this is the route I want to go down but I think at this stage it will fit them most effectively.

After my feedback, I was glad to get the green light with only a few minor tweaks needed. Helium balloons will make an appearance twice. First as a pleasant thing before being shown as used for evil. This means that the helium balloons will be used to celebrate the new interns arrival and then again at the end to make the elves voices squeaky.

This is my story so far with some minor tweaks…

A young intern wins one of several placements and must battle it out to be named as ‘Santa’s Little Helper’ at a world renowned toy workshop. Little does he realise that this factory has a dark secret. His colleagues are slowly going missing and there is an ominous locked door in the factory that he has seen people enter but never leave from…

When he arrives, he is ushered into a room filled with balloons and a banner saying “Congratulations! You have been chosen!” A worker allocates each of them with their work and sets the rules. The first and foremost being “Do not enter the door. There are some nasty chemicals being used in there”.

His suspicions are first aroused when one of his co-workers, a close friend, disappears when searching for a machine part. He believes he sees him a week later but more elf like…but as more interns come and go in the factory each week, he is certain that some of the familiar faces of his previous workers are still here but cannot prove his suspicions.

He sees workers in hazard suits enter the door daily and becomes more and more curious, so when a fellow worker leaves the mysterious door ajar, he seizes his opportunity to scramble through, only to discover a terrible secret. The room is filled with ceiling to floor ‘cutesifiers’ turning his old co-workers into overly cute elf figures.

Reindeers are powering the machines in hamster wheel like contraptions and huge vats of liquid that are being pumped into the ‘elves’ with signs saying “sugar”, “spice” and “everything nice”. The final step of the process sees giant helium balloons above the elves who are strapped to chairs, being forced to inhale more and more to perfect the iconic squeaky voice.

He runs out only to have Santa appear. With the facade broken, Santa places his hand on the interns’ shoulder and says “Son, where did you think all the elves came from?”

Image of shocked interns face then cut to black.

My next step for this project is to start research and begin some basic character designs. I think my first port of call should be research around elves, factory/warehouse/production line settings and interns. I’m hoping to map my script out slowly while doing this so I can get a sense of the overall theme.

This is my write up of the Family scene from Arthur Christmas using Adobe Story. This was a lot easier to do than I first thought although I'm not sure that my script is formatted correctly in some places.

This is the animatic made from the storyboard of Arthur Christmas. The timing is slightly off in some parts but this is due to the timings on Premiere Pro. Every time I add a half second to the end of it it changes it immediately. (Example 00:00:03:50 to about 00:00:07:00 for no reason at all)
If someone could help me remedy this I'd love to go back and edit this further. Maybe add in a few more images to break up the longer chunks and reflect the on screen action further.

Life drawing started off with 10 minute poses. I started these with a pencil outline before adding shading with pro markers to add a slight hint of light, reflection and shadow. After this we drew 7 one minute sketches. I added a light peach to the scarfs to accentuate the difference between body and prop.

Finally we did a collage. I enjoyed playing about with newspaper and ink. My end result was a little more abstract than I first anticipated and the newspaper started to 'fur' the paper which made for a very interesting result.

Monday, 18 January 2016

This was a great exercise which expanded on last week's lesson. This time using variance to help change our given character. I was given Homer Simpson and began playing about with the shape of his head while trying to keep some of his main features. This is a lot harder to do than I first thought as he is such an iconic character.

Then I began to play about with the shape of his body. Justin was a big help, constantly telling me to push myself further and to not be afraid of using over exaggeration to help push the changes across.

Finally, we were given a topic to base our work around. I had Gladiators. I came up with three characters and began drafting them out.

The first is our hero character. Well defined, muscular and everyone's favourite; swinging his legendary sword.

The second is a bulky and over exaggerated strong man. You can tell just by looking at him that he uses his size to his advantage with brute force.

The final character is the newbie. A bit of a dweeb in hand me down armour which is definitely too big for him.

Friday, 15 January 2016

After doing my like for like storyboard, I found that Arthur was a really nice character to draw. This is the start of a drawing that I have done of him. I'm planning to finish this later but I'm definitely proud of this work so far.

My like for like storyboard is from the film 'Arthur Christmas' by Aardman. I chose this film to tie in with my work so that I could use this as research for 'Santa's little helper'. These 16 frames are from the start of the film.

Thursday, 14 January 2016

After my mind maps surround my 3 main points (Santa's little helper, warehouse and helium balloon) I've come up with 12 potential plots. This is a lot harder than I first thought it would be as there is just so many different Christmas based films and shorts out there, it's hard to have a plot that doesn't tread on an already exsisting piece.

Plots 1, 5, 9, 11 and 12 are my favourite 5 so far but I'd love to hear people's feedback and some pros and cons between some of the plots I should aim for. Thank you! :)

Story ideas:

1. Baby reindeer becomes Santa's new helper and the elf before him becomes jealous and plays a series of pranks on him before baby finds courage. From smoke bombs to sending him on wild goose chases, locking him a crate to tying him to a ballon. He over comes his woes and a the reindeer asks Santa to let the both of them work side by side as equals.

2. Dangerous explosion in the factory resulting in helium leaking meant for the balloons. The head worker runs to Santa to tell him of the news but his voice is so high pitched that everyone laughs as they can't understand the imminent threat.

3.Christmas has finished for another year. The story follows the mischief of the elves as they fight the boredom of waiting for Santa to return from holiday with those all important orders for the next years toys.

4. Mother polar bear tells her cub a story/fairytale to fall asleep too and she begins to dream the tale.

5. The unsuspecting intern shows up for a once in a life time job in one of the worlds largest toy companies. Little does he realise that Santa is his boss.

6. Baby reindeer plays in Santa's workshop. Gets lost and crawls into a crate looking for food/Santa. Crate gets shipped to toy warehouse in the city where he must find his way home using only helium balloons...

7. Estranged helper battles to prove his worth and save his job. Voice recognition systems lock every door and to disguise his voice, he uses helium to change his voice to another worker.

8. Santa's helper joins him on his journey every year. This year a troubled ride leads to him falling from the sleigh, miles away from home. He must battle his way home or be lost forever.

9. Part of an organisation of elves that create the concepts behind the new toys, they feel they're losing their touch. To get them back on track a completion has been launched. Competitive coworkers begin to sabotage others work.

10. Santa has a evil brother. He believes that he should have been Santa and begin to poison the elves against him. It's a battle against time to get things under control in time for Christmas...who will win?

11. Contrary to common belief it is Yeti's that are Santa's faithful workers. Every year elves turn up asking for jobs and are slowly 'accepted' into the crowd. Yetis retaliate and place all elves inside a container and hover it off the ground with the use of helium balloons until a truce is called.

12. This year a large warehouse has been converted into a 'Santa's Grotto and Wonderland' for the children of the city to visit. With a fake village built inside and reindeer to pet it is a bigger hit that anyone could have expected. They run out of presents with hundreds of children still waiting. Instead of letting the child down, one helper begins to blow up balloons for the child and drawing snowmen, reindeer and elves on them, telling them that Santa has a the most amazing gift in store for them if they can behave until Christmas.

Tuesday, 12 January 2016

In this tutorial our job was to make the character light up without using any sort of external lighting i.e ambient, point or spot. We instead did this through faked rim lighting which is where we get the character to have natural lighting on him instead.

For this tutorial we had to convert a normal modelled set of teeth that hadn't had any shaders applied to it, to a finished piece that looks like someone's mouth has actually been x-rayed. To do this we applied a ramp, then changed the colour. After this we changed the transparency of the teeth and added an ambient light to ensure that the teeth glowed much like an x-ray. To ensure that the teeth x-ray looked legit we then bumped up the glow intensity to make it pop.

In this tutorial we learnt how to apply a shader onto a double-sided object as it can be seen in the images above. I really like this method and feel that the results are certainly pleasing to look at, they are also easy to set up.

Monday, 11 January 2016

For this new project, we have to draw a character, location and object out of a box at random. I've selected 'Santa's Little Helper' (not satan's little helper from the dyslexic part of me as I first thought - oops!), a warehouse and a helium balloon! Already so many ideas are popping to mind so I thought I would start out with some basic mind maps before drafting out some rough plots!

Our first character lesson with Justin was great! He sat with me for a while and showed me how to structure the skeleton beneath the drawings and how to help with proportions. The top 3 images are recreations of Popeye with 3 examples below that Justin drew to help me.